


The Rearranger

by fuckener



Category: Tenet (2020)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-28
Updated: 2020-08-28
Packaged: 2021-03-06 14:46:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26160598
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuckener/pseuds/fuckener
Summary: You liked him so immediately it’s like you knew he had a purpose for coming into your life the moment he arrived in it. No class you’ve ever taken has managed to explain phenomena like that, the body’s innate sense of knowing when it’s close to a person whose touch could permanently alter the world it inhabits.
Relationships: Neil/The Protagonist (Tenet)
Comments: 13
Kudos: 211
Collections: tenet huh





	The Rearranger

In the hotel room in Mumbai, you glance at him in the mirror as he slips off the shirt he sweated through dodging the police. He doesn’t even have to look at you to catch you doing it. 

“You think you’re slick,” he says, pulling on a T-shirt, shaking his head like he expected a better attempt at discretion. You’re still obvious to him even when he thinks he doesn’t know you.

You know how this goes because he’s told you before. You flirt, and there’s something about you that makes him go along with it even though he should know better. Maybe he feels the way you did when you first met him, surprised by the ease you felt around someone you thought was a stranger, pliable with it. It was like something as soft and unobstructive as smoke curled around you to lead you closer to him.

-

In Oslo, the night before you break into the free port, tension simmering, it happens.

Touching him feels new again right now - your fingers digging into the muscles of the backs of his thighs, the heat of his hands over your shirt, his weight on you. It’s the first time he’s ever been touched by you and it’s like the energy of that is transferable. 

You wonder if it was the same for him once, if he looked at you and thought, I know you and I need you to know me again. Maybe there’s some reality where you get to ask him about it, you think, and you cup the side of his face, where someday you’ll nick the skin under your hand with a razorblade trying to shave his scruff and he’ll shake his head and say, _Neil,_ _I trusted you -_ toilet paper clinging to his tiny bleeding wound, perfectly deadpan.

You already know the shapes of the scars under his clothes. Raised lines across his torso from knives and near misses. A faded old mark on the side of his knee from the fall that made him quit highschool football (number 18, running back. You’ve seen photos of him in the jersey and everything.) 

You know the ones even he doesn’t know about yet. An inverted bullet graze in Dubai, left shoulder, taking a chunk out of the skin there and leaving tiny pieces of the shell embedded underneath. Glass that left a pink-white scar on the arch of his foot when it went too deep. You will pull it out from under his skin. You will sew the bullet wound on his arm. You learned the basics of first aid from taking care of him and from watching him, a sterilized needle poking out from between his teeth and sweat on his forehead, as he took care of you. 

You pull him down by the back of the neck and kiss him exactly how you know he wants you to, scraping all the things you aren’t allowed to say across his bottom lip, sliding them into his mouth with your tongue. Your hands move along the fabric over his thighs to the curve of his ass, and it’s mostly because you know he’ll find it funny, how forward it is.

“Wow, okay,” he says out the side of his mouth, eyes closed, eyebrows up, hips twitching. “So it’s like that.”

“It is,” you say, agreeably, and he huffs a laugh he doesn’t know you’ve missed hearing.

-

The first time you met him you were twenty-eight, freshly graduated for the second time, at a pub near the university. You were alone because you were always alone at Cambridge, and he appeared out of the crowd of old football fans and stood right next to you at the bar. You looked at him sidelong for a few seconds more than you meant to, and when he caught you doing it his mouth tilted up to the side like he found it funny, like he knew. Being looked at like that made your stomach dip.

You gestured your head. “Drink?” 

“Brazen.” But he was nodding, approving, mouth quirking a little higher. “Diet Coke.”

“I’m afraid that doesn’t count,” you said, faux-apologetically, and he flashed his pearly white American teeth and said, “Jack and Diet Coke.”

You put your hand out for the bartender to come over and squinted when you smiled at him. “That’ll do.”

You remember it so clearly, the way he looked back at you, the magnetic pull in the air. You liked him so immediately it’s like you knew he had a purpose for coming into your life the moment he arrived in it. No class you’ve ever taken has managed to explain phenomena like that, the body’s innate sense of knowing when it’s close to a person whose touch could permanently alter the world it inhabits. 

That night you took your drinks outside and sat at an empty corner of the smoking area, by the tacky year-round Christmas lights. After enough ducking around questions for the sake of it you managed to get some information out of each other. You told him you had a master’s degree in physics as of earlier that same day and he told you that he’d studied political science with a minor in Spanish. When you asked what he did for a living his expression shifted, softening slightly, and he told you to ask him again later. (You’d ask him again at 6AM on the long detour home as you walked alongside the river, as the sun was coming up, and he’d tell you.)

After a few more drinks things became hazier and time started skipping around too quickly. You remember that your chairs had gradually moved closer together. You remember looking at him in the red green blue blinking lights, this stranger you didn’t want to leave, remember thinking, this is a weird night, and smiling to yourself about it as he told you about why he didn’t agree with your decision to be so English.

You remember that at some point in the quiet after last call, he’d curled his hand around the base of yours, his fingertips aligned along the middle of your wrist, pinky ducking under the cuff of your shirt. Just sat there and held your hand like that and turned to you with a look on his face that was asking for something you knew, with a sudden feeling of sobriety, that you were willing to give.

-

In the closed city, after the dust has settled and burst and resettled, you head for the tunnel where the algorithm was, where it will be again. 

“Wait,” he calls.

You stop, turning.

He’s going to ask you not to go. The scared look on his face, the way his hands curl up at his sides, those things will make you consider it for a second - but this isn’t the end. 

You tell him so. 

-

If you could pick a place and time to die you’d choose North Italy, five years ago.

You had a few days there where you felt like regular people. You’d felt the potential for that kind of life in you then, bright in your chest like a laugh, a contentment that settled over you for the entire stay, and maybe even him, too. Maybe in some other world, it’s always like this, you thought. Maybe there’s a reality where our lives are completely unextraordinary except in that we’re still fated to meet. 

The last day you were there you woke up with your legs and arms tangled with his and his body stuck to yours with sweat. He would sleep wrapped around you even in the ninety degree heat of Lake Como in July. You woke up to the stillness of the room around you, flooded with orange light and patterned with the shadows of trees. His soft breath on was the back of your neck and his body on yours was lax with sleep. His hand was spread over your chest, the place it always found its way to at night, measuring the slow countdown of your heartbeat as it went on and on.

You closed your eyes again. You would take that moment with you when you left.


End file.
